Designing Interdisciplinary Scheduling Decision Support Systems in Small-Sized SME Environments: The i-DESME Framework

Abstract

This paper introduces i-DESME, an interdisciplinary framework for the design of IT scheduling Decision Support Systems in small-sized SME industrial environments. The proposed framework adopts a structured software engineering design approach, which has been suitably modified in order to explicitly identify and model the interdisciplinary characteristics that dictate the implementation of scheduling processes within an SME industrial environment. The framework aims to help practitioners design support systems which are not only effective, but are also being trusted and adopted for use by human schedulers. An overview of the framework's application within the environment of a typical micro-sized food manufacturing company is provided. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.